Talk of machines taking over the planet is the stuff of science fiction but if world domination was just a simple numbers game, some machines have already “taken over” from their human masters.

One machine, the particular brand of computer processor found inside all iPhones and lots of otherelectronic devices, has been quietly spreading around the globe at a phenomenal rate. There are some interesting statistics on just how many of these processors are out there published in an interview with engineer Steve Furber [1]. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

“Around the end of 2007, the ten-thousand-millionthARM [Advanced RISC Machine] had been shipped, so there are more ARMs than people on the planet. I believe production is currently running at about 10 million a day. It is projected to rise to about one per person on the planet per year within two or three years”.

Those numbers highlighted in bold (emphasis mine) are completely mind-boggling. As humans, we are outnumbered by just one brand of machine! Of course, they are just lots of “dumb” computer chips with no intelligence. But Furber suspects that:

“there’s more ARM computing power on the planet than everything else ever made put together” [1]